I am a wheat bioinformatician with wet lab molecular biology and fieldwork experience. I typically develop tools and pipelines to analyse next-generation sequencing datasets for mutant identification, gene expression and comparative analyses and for epigenetic studies. I am primarily focused on hexaploid wheat with the goal of understanding key adaptive traits in wheat and their development.
At EI I am working in collaboration with colleagues at the JIC, the USA and Germany on an ERA-CAPS funded project to understand the epigenome of wheat. In this project we are sequencing the full methylome of Chinese Spring wheat and observing how polyploid genome formation affects genome methylation. Currently I am using gene capture to analyze methylation and SNP variation across a diverse landrace population of wheat (the Watkins collection).
Before joining EI I completed my PhD at the University of Liverpool where I largely used gene capture, mapping and SNP calling in hexaploid wheat next-generation sequencing datasets for mapping-by-sequencing mutant identification and epigenetic studies in elite wheat varieties.
